“FCAI gave me the freedom to shape my career”

For Kevin Luck, a postdoc at FCAI was an important step to a faculty position.

How do you build robots with the intelligence to solve real-world tasks, but also design them with the most cutting-edge materials? Combining the separate fields of behavior optimization and materials design may be a tall order, but at the interdisciplinary Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), Kevin Luck has made it happen. Luck is just wrapping up a two-year postdoctoral research position hosted by the Intelligent Robotics group of Ville Kyrki at Aalto University.

“What is great about FCAI is it brings together people from different domains. I come from the machine learning domain but do robotics, and could connect with FCAI faculty like Patrick Rinke, who does materials design,” says Luck. “The FCAI community brings application domains, and colleagues from across universities, together for collaborations that otherwise would not happen.”

Luck’s research at FCAI has focused on behavior and morphology for robots using deep reinforcement learning. An example is this paper where Luck and FCAI colleagues developed AI-driven design methods that enable robots and agents to not only learn behavior to solve tasks, but also allow them to adapt their morphology. This is similar to how evolutionary forces in nature equipped animals with the ability to learn and adapt to changing environments that also led to body adaptations for better survivability in their environmental niche. This video illustrates how it works:

Soon, Luck plans to continue this research in embodied systems as an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Deploying AI-assisted design so far has only worked in simulation,” observes Luck. “Real-world use cases require merging new algorithms, the design of materials and computationally intelligent behavior.”

At FCAI, Luck was able to shape his own research project and tie it together with existing work at the center, for example from the design group or the autonomous systems group. “There was no pre-defined project that I had to work on, and FCAI provided me with the funding and freedom to really explore,” says Luck. “I also took over organizing the FCAI Teams, which helped develop and demonstrate the soft skills that interview panels are looking for, beyond research and teaching.”

After a globe-trotting tour including bachelor’s and master’s degrees in his native Germany, a PhD in the US and a first postdoc in the UK, Luck says that the past two years at FCAI have been critical to landing a faculty position. “Not only does working at an interdisciplinary, Research Council of Finland-funded Flagship look good on the CV, you can also develop the management and organization skills expected by hiring committees.” He recommends applying to FCAI if you have your own research plan, agenda and goals that align with an advertised project. “The freedom, options and connections within FCAI let you shape your career.”